Vancouver Peace Summit (thanks Auntie!)

This past Tuesday I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go and see a panel discussion with His Holiness the Dalai Lama along with some other brilliant speakers including Sir Kenneth Robinson, Steven Covey (author of the 7 habits of highly effective people) and three members of the Blue men who have just started a preschool in New York called the Blue School. The Conference was called "Educating the Heart" and was part of the Vancouver Peace Summit.

The panel began with a discussion of the problems with out current educational system. In particular it's focus on IQ and on facts rather than thinking. This seems to be due to the fact that our current system was born out of the industrial era, and because of this tends to view children as so many train cars and "education" as a kind of giant grain silo, theroetically filling the children up with knowledge, or in most cases information, and facts rather than nurturing creativity and developing a deeper knowledge. The Blue Men prefer to use the metaphor of children as rocket ships and their goal is to run around with some fire trying to light a fuse. They view the promotion of creativity as the most important goal of education.This to me seemed t fit nicely with what I understand of the Reggio philosophy. What do you think?

The blue men then used their performative skills to hilariously demonstrate the 6 creative mindsets they have identified which are:

-The Scientist: making connections, investigating, chinking, grouping sorting, making sense of the world analytically, rationally

-The Shaman: Using Rhythm, dancing, chanting, magic, using our intuition

-The Group Member: Keeps the Shaman in check by focusing on the importance of collaboration, the needs of everyone, but can also lead to groupthink

-The Trickster: Helps to shake things up, new fresh ideas, but can lead to anarchy if there is too much

-The Hero: Has high ideals, and goals, os a creator and gets things done, but can be a workaholic,

-The Innocent: Seeing things with fresh eyes, staying naive, seeing the beauty, taking time to appreciate be silly, childlike

They have noticed that during particularly strong performances they will feel themselves moving through all these different stages, and posit that each of us has them all to some extent and that as educators and thinkers it is important not to get stuck in any one area, and to think about how we may be able to incorporate all aspects into our daily practice. It was helpful as I sometimes feel at school as though our focus on letting the children explore may also need both guidance and ways of seeing this exploration and knowing when creative energy needs to be re-focused so that it doesn't turn into chaos, anarchy, groupthink etc. This is true of the children as well as us as teachers in my view and I hope to be able to keep these mindsets in mind over the next while as I continue to settle into the school.